In an article about Brexit, Max Fisher of the NYT writes:
[T]he world has spent much of the last few centuries organizing itself under the principle of national self-determination, in which people with a common identity acquire their own state. Think of Italy for the Italians in the 1870s, Algeria for the Algerians in 1962, Tajikistan for the Tajiks in 1991 and so on.While this idea has brought liberation to much of the world, it has also contributed to countless wars, including Nazi Germany’s invasions to “unify” with the German people of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia along ethno-linguistic lines and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
So while many examples of national self-determination are good, Jewish self-determination is in the same league as Nazi invasions of neighboring countries.
Also, when exactly did the “Israel-Palestine” conflict begin? It certainly wasn’t in 1948, that was the Israel-Arab conflict. The only wars between Israel and Palestinians came after Palestinians fired thousands of rockets were fired on Israel, but this happened after Israel was already six decades old.
So Fisher is saying that if a group starts wars and terror sprees against the world’s only Jewish state, those wars makes the victim state retroactively something that should never have been created in the first place.
This is hardly a one-off for Fisher, who was hired by the Times after other similarly offensive statements such as when he justified (while pretending not to) the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teens.
(h/t Noam)
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